Why all of us must stress cultural sharing
As a fan of Mother Jones magazine, I don’t often disagree with the progressive monthly’s editor in chief, Clara Jeffery. But she asked for it with this breathtaking tweet after President Donald Trump fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase:
“That the missiles are called tomahawks (sic),” she tweeted, “must enrage a lot of Native Americans.”
Or maybe not? I suspect fewer Native Americans were upset by the Tomahawk references than other Americans who were upset by Jeffery’s presumption, judging by their snarky responses to her tweet.
Yet her concern is widely shared under the heading of “cultural appropriation.” It means what it sounds like, the appropriation by a privileged group of an oppressed group’s culture without permission.
Unfortunately, when taken to extremes, the fight against cultural appropriation can turn into a divisive fight against one of this land’s most underappreciated opportunities: cultural sharing.
A surprising example recently came out of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., in a dust-up over hoop earrings. Yes, some Hispanic students accused white women who wear hoop earrings of appropriating Latina culture, according to online magazine Inside Higher Ed. Three Latina students reportedly started the controversy by writing “White girl, take off your hoops” on a campus free-speech wall.
When the story boiled over into the conservative blogosphere, the young Latinas predictably received a wave of nasty emails from off-campus. Some sounded threatening enough for the college’s president, Melvin Oliver, to issue an open letter headlined “Hate Speech Is Free Speech.”
I agree with that. But the more reasonable conservatives raised a fair point, too. We all should be wary of the thin line between racial pride and racial supremacy.
Fashion designer Marc Jacobs faced charges of “cultural appropriation” last September when he closed New York Fashion Week with a parade on the runway of models who happened to be white and wearing wigs that looked like dreadlocks. Culture will not be contained.
Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” said as much when she recently called the “cultural appropriation” issue overblown. If black women who oppose cultural appropriation are going to be consistent, she said, they should stop straightening their hair and wearing weaves. After all, “if we’re wearing white lady hair,” she said, “isn’t that appropriation as well?”
Maybe so. Look around. Cultural appropriation is no less American than apple pie, pizza and spring rolls.
Yes, I, too, want to wince when I see, for example, non-Native Americans wearing sacred Native American artifacts as if they were mere fashion statements.
And the nation winced at Pepsi’s nowinfamous and ill-considered TV commercial featuring Kendall Jenner that tried to appropriate images of protests but mangled the message.
But I am even more disturbed by the recent protests mounted by black artists against a painting by white artist Dana Schutz at the Whitney Museum in New York. The abstract painting, called “Open Casket,” depicts the mutilated body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black Chicagoan who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi in 1955, allegedly for whistling at a white woman.
Schutz based her work on photographs, published in Jet and the Chicago Defender at the urging of Till’s mother, that were powerful enough to help ignite the civil rights movement. But now, more than 60 years later, Schutz’s abstract depiction has had to withstand protests and calls for the work to be destroyed, mainly because the artist is not black.
Yet, mainstream culture won’t be made any less white if we African-Americans segregate ourselves into our own monocultural enclaves. We don’t have to steal each other’s cultures if we learn to share.